Mrs. Ogden was watching from the dining-room window as she often watched for Joan. Her pale face, peering between the lace curtains, had grown to fill the girl with a combined sense of irritation and pity. She called Joan into the room and closed the door. Joan knew from her mother's manner that something was about to happen, it was full of a suppressed excitement. Without a word she led Joan to the sofa and made her sit beside her; she took the girl's face between her two cold hands and gazed into her eyes.
Then she began. "Joan, darling, I want to talk to you. I've wanted to have a serious talk with you for some time. You're not a child any longer, you're nearly a woman now; it seems so strange to me, for somehow I always think of you as my little Joan. That's the way of mothers, I suppose; they find it difficult to realize that their children can ever grow up, but you have grown up and it's likely that you'll fall in love some day—perhaps want to marry, and there are things that I think it my duty to tell you——" She paused. "Facts about life," she concluded awkwardly.
Her conscience stirred uneasily, she felt almost afraid of what she was about to do, but she thrust the feeling down. "It is my duty, I'm doing it for Joan's sake," she told herself. "I'm doing it for her sake and not for my own."
Joan sat very still, she wondered what was coming; her mother's eyes looked eager and shy and she was a little flushed. Mrs. Ogden began to speak again in quick jerks, she turned her face slightly aside showing the delicate line of her profile, her hands moved incessantly, plaiting and unplaiting the fringed trimming on her dress.
"When I was not very much older than you, in India," she went on, "I was like you, little more than a child. I was not clever as you are—I never have been clever, my dear, but I was beautiful, Joan, really beautiful. Do you remember, you used to think me beautiful?" The voice grew wistful and paused, then went on without waiting for a reply. "I had no mother to tell me anything, and what I learnt about things I learnt from other girls of my own age; we speculated together and came to many wrong conclusions." Another pause. "About the facts of life, I mean—about men and marriage and—what it all meant. Men made love to me, dearest, they admired your mother in those days, but their love-making was restrained and respectful, as the love-making of a man should be to a young unmarried girl, and——" she hesitated, "it told me nothing—nothing, Joan, of what was to come. Then I met your father, I met James, and he proposed to me and I married him. He was good looking then, in a way—at least I thought so—and a wonderful horseman, and that appealed to me, as you may guess, for we Routledges have always been fond of horses. Well, dear, that's what I want to tell you about—not the horses, my married life, I mean."
She went on quickly now, the words tumbled over each other, her voice gathered volume, growing sharp and resentful. As she spoke she felt overwhelmed with the relief that came with this crude recital of long hidden miseries. Joan watched her, astonished; watched the refined, worn face, the delicate, peevish lips that were uttering such incongruous things. Something of her mother's sense of outrage entered into her as she listened, filling her with resentment and pity for this handicapped and utterly self-centred creature, for whom the natural laws had worked so unpropitiously. She thought bitterly of her father, breathing heavily on his pillows upstairs, of his lack of imagination, his legally sanctified self-indulgence, his masterful yet stupid mind, but she only said:
"Why have you told me all this, dearest?"
Mrs. Ogden took her hand. "Why have I told you? Oh, Joan, because of Richard Benson, because I think you're falling in love for the first time."
Joan looked at her in amazement. "You think that?" she asked.
"Well, isn't it so? Joan, tell me quickly, isn't it so?"